A descendant of Thomas Jefferson explores inheritance through poetry

In The Forage House, published by Red Hen Press, Tess Taylor explores the historical and individual toll of inheritance and how we are shaped by the legacies that come to represent our past and present realities.

A descendant of Thomas Jefferson, Taylor was greatly affected when, in 1997, University of Virginia biologist Eugene Foster discovered a genetic connection between the relatives of Sally Hemings and the country’s third president and UVA founder.

“It was a fierce wake-up call,” she said, in a Publishers Weekly interview earlier this year.

Taylor was dually affected by her California upbringing and by her ties, through Thomas Jefferson Randolph and the Randolph-Taylors, to slavery, and propelled as a journalist and a poet to uncover the truth of her family lore. During the years of 2005 and 2006, she was in residence at Monticello, where she worked with archaeologists and historians, combed family attics, and pored over historical documents, including letters, wills, and auction records, in research for the book. In an effort to name and give record to the past, Taylor infuses many of the documents she found into poems like “Southhampton County Will 1745” and “Martha Jefferson’s Housewife,” but also enlivens the spirit of her grandfather in “Oral History 1963,” and sings of her literary and American bequest in “Song for Cerrito” and “Reading Walden in the Air.”

While The Forage House is Taylor’s press debut, she also wrote a chapbook, entitled The Misremembered World, which was awarded the New York Chapbook Fellowship and was published by the Poetry Society of America. Her journalistic work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, and her poetry, acclaimed by Natasha Trethewey and Eavan Boland, has been published in Shenandoah, The Harvard Review, and Poetry Magazine, among others. She currently lives in her hometown of El Cerrito, California and teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

In anticipation of Taylor’s book signing at New Dominion Bookshop on September 11, C-VILLE spoke to Tess Taylor by phone.

C-VILLE Weekly: How are you specifically related to Thomas Jefferson and what role does inheritance play in this collection?

Tess Taylor: Thomas Jefferson Randolph [Thomas Jefferson’s grandson] was the grandfather of Bennett Taylor, who went off and fought in the Civil War, and Bennett Taylor is my grandfather’s grandfather (Lee Taylor, who is mentioned in the poem “Oral History 1963”). So as I thought about this book and which stories to feature and which characters were going to pop, and as I was kind of learning this genealogy, those people as markers of proximity or distance to Jefferson were really fascinating to me.

Jefferson is very interesting, but you might also think about this book—in its small way—not only about literal family but also as framing a kind of dialogue with inheritance itself, or as a proxy discussion for any flawed thing we inherit. You might notice references to Auden, Hopkins, Ginsberg as well—there are some literary figures passing through this somewhat historical gathering. Think about the literary past—also based on haunting exclusions, and full of cruelties and riches. We look back and critique it, we also can’t simply throw it away; we find ourselves and orient ourselves through recourse to it. We reinvent it, but we are also sticky with associations.

In “World’s End: On the Site of Randolph Wilton,” you write, “O descendants, I am sorry/Ancestors I would undo this if I could.” Why is it important to undo or sort out the transgressions of the past?

As a writer I became really preoccupied with the questions of what it meant not to write people down. This is a book that is enthralled with documents and a lot of the poems are achieved through looking at documents and looking for documents. So the fact, then, that the documents don’t reveal people became something that was haunting for me. It became a thing where I could say, well, whether or not you agree with the story about Sally Hemings, something we can all agree with is that this was something that happened, where we didn’t write people’s names down. You can say there’s no proof, but we’re the very family that created the condition by which there is no proof.

How does writing a collection of poems with a historical basis differ from writing poetry based on personal and narrative impressions of life?

I thought I was going to be writing essays and some kind of journalistic book about what had happened in my family. As I started working with it, the material, I found that it was overwhelming to try to create a complete and coherent account of what had happened; that some people in my family felt threatened by the project of journalism whereas poetry somehow didn’t threaten them as much. Also, I was dealing with these very haunting documents. Poetry kind of presented itself as a form that made use of absence. You could be working with shards because poems are like shards. I had the chance to work with archaeologists at Monticello. I would go out and see the things that they had dug up, and I’d see these tiny little buttons. These little buttons or these little pipe stems that they’d excavated from the ground, and see the enormity of the absence around them, and, to me, that suggested a poem more than a big long essay.

What are you trying to accomplish, personally, as a poet?

Well, Elizabeth Bishop once said that, “If you came in contact with a work of art it would make the world look different for 24 hours.” That’s always something that I’ve looked for in the work that I read. I like the idea that poetry can unsettle the present, in a way that it can make the day that we live in feel more mysterious if we engage with it. That’s my hope for the work that I make.

Lauren Hoffman had never heard of Paste Magazine. But in 2006, soon after the release of her most acclaimed record Choreography, the LP’s lead single was included on one of the national magazine’s music samplers alongside the likes of The Hold Steady, Bright Eyes and The Shins. It wasn’t the

Derisive punk pranksters ONWE make their second local appearance this month at the end of a tour that has booked up and down the East Coast as well as four shows at Austin, Texas’ South by Southwest Festival. Since the 2014 release of the single “Unpaid Internship,” the trio has risen to the

Emily Hearn Hourglass/Old Prince Records Be warned: Emily Hearn will be your new favorite singer-songwriter. On her sophomore effort Hearn grows artistically by leaps and bounds with a rich, understated vocal prowess, a sonic palette beyond the country and folk stylings of earlier albums, and

Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo’s nonfiction masterpiece, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, hits the big screen in a live streamed National Theatre production directed by Rufus Norris. Peek behind the curtain of Mumbai’s luxury travel industry to discover the ambitions of a bevy of slum

If you are a parent of a millennial there’s a good chance you can sing along to the tunes of “kindie rock” songstress Laurie Berkner. Her hits “We Are The Dinosaurs,” “Bumblebee (Buzz Buzz)” and “Victor Vito” (made popular on Nick Jr. TV channel) offered a welcome alternative to the catchy

Actor, director and UVA Drama professor Kate Burke is on a mission to change American theater. “I’m very aware of how the American tradition has been influenced by Method acting,” Burke said in a recent interview. “There are some good things about it, but in distorted form it focuses on

Virginia-born and Nashville-based, Nora Jane Struthers makes her country roots come alive on the energetic new album, Wake. The former high school teacher’s first self-produced record crosses Emmylou Harris with Pearl Jam in a collection of percussive panoramas and Southern-fried slide guitar.

John McCutcheon is equal parts musician and storyteller, skilled with a variety of instruments but also engaging when telling tales between tunes. He is a Wisconsin native who called Charlottesville home for years before moving to Smoke Rise, Georgia. He is also an avid community organizer and

Caroline Spence has taken Nashville by storm over the past two years, winning songwriting competitions at the Rocky Mountain Folks Fest, Kerrville Folk Festival and taking American Songwriter Magazine’s 2013 grand prize. The momentum encouraged Spence to crowdsource funding for the full-length

“I feel like an old soul in general. If I’m shopping, I’d rather buy something old and upcycle it or do something that appreciates the value of what it used to be,” said Charlottesville- based alternative photographer Cary Oliva. “Things were just more beautiful back in the day.” The intrigue

If you ever come across a herd of nerds walking around Charlottesville with expensive-looking cameras, do not fear. They’re just photo walkers. And while their numbers are growing, they’re mostly harmless. Charlottesville has at least two groups that regularly hold photo walks, and the

There is a sneaky sort of rebelliousness in Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella—in the way it pushes back against the tide of revisionism and misdirected irony that has overtaken family entertainment in recent years. Sincere instead of sarcastic, elegant instead of flashy, and wishing to enchant

Up-and-coming Southern rockers J. Roddy Walston & The Business are on tour in support of Essential Tremors, an album that borrows its name from a nervous system disorder that’s plagued the band’s frontman throughout his career. Walston said that it makes sense to be more open about his

With a career spanning more than four decades, Lily Tomlin has earned her legendary status in American comedy. After becoming a household name on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” in the early ’70s, Tomlin went on to starring roles in TV, film and theater. In 2003, the comedienne extraordinaire

Probably all of us have felt it at one point or another. For some, it comes in the form of an obsession with story—the drive to know what happens next, to revel in character and incident and situation, to follow a plot as it arcs and swoops and blossoms (or crashes and implodes). For some […]

Named after the legendary string orchestra that played for the French king at Versailles, Les Violons du Roy transports listeners to the sumptuous courts of 18th century Europe. Led by conductor Mathieu Lussier and pianist Marc-André Hamelin, the 15-member group performs elegant pieces by

With songs that are busy, crowded and accessible, a rock ‘n’ roll diner is the perfect venue for Brooklyn-based indie folk artist Bay Uno’s Charlottesville debut. And while Uno is on the later side of middle age, he’s hip, like a grass-fed burger topped with cheddar and artisan

Kentucky native Ben Sollee is quickly becoming a household name thanks to his innovative songwriting and inventive approach to the cello. Using his bow and his right hand, he slaps and plucks chords creating a full groove that sounds more like a trio than a soloist. His recent credits include

Founded in 1967, Fleetwood Mac has since changed its line-up nine times. Despite inner turmoil, the group practically trademarked the folk rock sound in the 1970s, and made history on the charts with hits like “Go Your Own Way,” “Don’t Stop” and “Dreams.” The core members got back on the road

From start to finish, everything about the Chappie experience is a pleasant surprise. Yes, Neill Blomkamp’s story of a police robot in the near future who becomes sentient can be viewed as a synthesis of Short Circuit and RoboCop, but the film gets the more familiar plot elements out of the way